Very questionable food: on eating animals

My earliest memory is a hazy but lasting one. I was around five years old at most, with my father, fishing on the beach where we so luckily lived. He caught one, a big silver creature at least as long as I was tall. Once he had it on the sand, he unhooked it and handed it to me, saying “Take this up to Mama so she can cook it for dinner!” I dutifully grabbed its tail and began to drag it up to its final resting place, our barbecue.

But then something momentous happened. Just a few paces from the sea, little silver fingerlings began to spurt from the dying fish’s belly. I dropped her tail and stared, aghast, as they wiggled on the sand. Then, instinctively or otherwise, I scooped them up in my hands and ran back to the ocean’s edge, throwing them into the surf. But when I ran back to the big fish there were more! Again I scooped them up and ran to the water. By my third trip I was crying. Something was surely going wrong. But my Papa just laughed and said, “That’s right, toss them back in. We’ll eat them when they grow big next year!”

My dad was right. We did eat many more fish over the years, if perhaps not the exact ones expelled from our catch by her death throes. I went on to became a fairly expert fisherman and even a certified “junior marksman” with a rifle, even though I never shot living things other than cacti. Eating meat of all types was as all-American as any part of The American Dream, which in our case included some very tasty steaks and seafood cooked at ocean’s edge.

That changed for me as I became a somewhat more aware teen. Vegetarianism was part of the whole countercultural ethos I romanticized, and meat was “murder” and thus out of my diet (I decided this early enough to still be able to say I have never eaten at McDonald’s.) A vegan hippie eatery sprouted in our town named simply “Love Animals, Don’t Eat Them” (but was shut down after health inspectors found a live camel licking the peanut butter vat in the kitchen). The then-ubiquitous Hare Krishna devotees in our area proclaimed that “Mankind will never know peace until the slaughter and eating of animals stops!” It was a mystical sentiment but rang oddly semi-plausible as well, at least to me.

Then I read more rational arguments for non-meat diets like Frances Moore Lappe’s seminal Diet for a Small Planet and others, learning that the meat-heavy diet might be not only spiritually and physically unhealthy but a root cause of starvation and pollution on earth. Many other admired figures confirmed a no-meat stance, from Gandhi (“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated”) to Einstein (“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution of a vegetarian diet”) to Krishnamurti (“Killing an animal is like killing your neighbor; you kill animals because you have lost touch with nature, with all the living things on this earth”) and even such an ultra-rational Western philosophers as Schopenhauer (“Shame on such a morality that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun”) More recently, revered Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh warns often of the connections between meat and world hunger, noting that “Our way of eating is very violent”).

It thus seemed and still seems to me that ethics, spirituality, ecology, health, and good politics were all aligned on this issue like few others. And besides all that, I remained very healthy, even athletic, without using meat for fuel.

Here I should confess: I sometimes still eat fish, and more rarely, other creatures, but then only when such food is offered to me a gesture or gift, and where refusal might be insulting (and most meat tends to make me uneasy in my guts now, so this is no lapse due to temptation, but rather an attempt at good manners.) As already confessed, I’ve killed fish. It seems to me a quantum evolutionary leap from fish to mammals (although research has confirmed that even fish do feel pain.) Short of being threatened with starvation, I could not personally kill any of the kind of mammals humans eat, so I don’t eat them. Simple, really. I eat plants with gusto, and would and do “kill” them; anyone who tries to equate the sentience and suffering of broccoli to a cow is also engaging in sophistry and is perhaps trying to justify their own hypocrisies.

Some – most – of my friends and loved ones eat meat, so I can’t judge them and certainly don’t like or love them any less. It’s muy own struggle. But this is not solely a personal credo. Not eating meat has been called a form of activism – a passive one, but boycotts are sometimes effective ways of changing bad practices and policies. We learn increasingly that meat production is a major source of pollution and greenhouse gases, a huge consumer of water and other resources, even an indirect factor in human starvation due to use of so much grain to produce meat. Foregoing meat may seem like a drop in the ocean of suffering, yet how many of our other “right actions” seem similarly limited in scale and impact? Every person who stops eating meat lessens the demand, and in the aggregate one less cow or pig or chicken or lamb or rabbit or sheep may not be bred only to live in misery and then be slaughtered in terror while still young. The seemingly nutty Krishna devotees of my youth may in fact be right; how can we espouse peace while, as Einstein also wondered, choosing to make our own bodies a graveyard?

Mark Twain once pointedly remarked that “The human conscience can subsist on some very questionable food.” We should take his warning literally in this case. In our modern world, we practice denial on many levels. The horrors of modern factory “farming” are well documented and nowadays only the willfully ignorant choose to ignore them. The Los Angeles Times examined factory farming and charged that the industry is – contrary to public relations arguments that such practices are becoming more humane – on a “moral race to the bottom.” A holocaust of other species happens daily, largely to feed our appetites – unnecessary appetites at that. The side effects are ecological pollution, ill health among those who overindulge, and hunger among many of the rest. And many of us know all this on some level. Our conscience may not remind us as dramatically as Gandhi’s, who reported that he was haunted all his life by the cries from his stomach of a goat he had tasted when young. But we do know on some level. As the luminous poet Mary Oliver wrote about her guilty conscience when she ate meat, “You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.”

The great California poet Robinson Jeffers, who celebrated the harshness of nature in his immortal verses set on the Big Sur coast, refrained from hunting and fishing as he “did not want to cause suffering to any living creature.” And nobody could call him a sentimentalist of any kind. He just faced reality, comfortable or not.

According to a Wall Street Journal story, my “conversion” to a non-meat diet while young is not unusual, and vegetarianism is again becoming trendy among teens. I remember reading once – I forget who said it – that “One measure of success is found in how well we retain the ideals of our youth throughout our lives.” Most young vegetarians apparently “get over it,” as one annoyed father puts it in the WSJ story. My own dad jokingly asked waiters if they served “rabbit food” while pointing at me. Others say they don’t feel right if they don’t eat some meat, but nutrition science indicates that with a bit of supplementation, especially with vitamin B12 and perhaps iron in some cases, most people do fine without eating flesh. And I wonder how many former vegetarians, like me, will forever feel that they have somehow backslid from a worthy ideal.

So here’s a suggestion for those who do not want to have others do their dirty work: Try not to eat anything you would not kill with your own hands. And before you do consider any such killing, look into the eyes of the animal about to die. If you have pets, think of them in the place of the creature you are about to kill. How many of us, given this simple stricture, would still eat animals? Likely – hopefully – the number would be few. And if you are one of those few, that may be another issue to examine. Perhaps your own conscience is subsisting on some very questionable food?